1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the field of visual presentation on screens, and more specifically, to the visual presentation of input fields.
2. Description of Art
Computing devices with small screens, for example, smartphones and functionality enhanced mobile phones, are well known. Such computing devices include screens that display network and application user interfaces, for example, web browser pages or applets. These user interfaces may have a large volume of information including multiple text input fields within the rendered user interface. Moreover, the screens are configured to be touch sensitive to allow direct interaction with the user interface through the screen.
One problem with having such input fields within a rendered user interface is that the input fields are often difficult to use because of their small size. The small size of input fields makes it difficult to place a cursor for text entry into the input field. Further, text typed into the input fields is difficult to read due to the small viewing area and small font size of the text. Hence, a user is required to have very fine motor skills in order to place a cursor inside an input field, and very good eyesight in order to read the text of the input field.
One attempt to address the shortcomings of the art has been to allow a user to manually increase the zoom of the user interface being rendered. However, this requires that the user manually zoom in and out after entering text in each input field. Often there are many sequential input fields that the user must enter text into in order to obtain a desired result. As a result, it is time consuming to perform a manual zoom action to switch between input fields. Further, the user require considerable dexterity in performing a zoom action in certain hardware configurations, such as touch sensitive screens requiring zoom gestures. Users lacking such dexterity often tire from the process of manually applying a zoom function to access the input field. Moreover, still many user interfaces lack mechanisms to allow zooming, hence, making access to such input field almost prohibitable.
Hence, the art lacks, inter alia, a mechanism for automatically re-sizing input fields of a user interface without requiring interacting with application commands for zooming.